SAN JOSE — Nearly eight years ago, a retired nurse was attacked after climbing into her SUV in the parking lot of a Morgan Hill Safeway by a man she said wore a hooded sweatshirt, had some facial hair and used a stun gun to repeatedly shock her in the neck.

That woman, Annette Walters, testified Tuesday in Santa Clara County Superior Court where prosecutors allege her attacker was the same man they have charged with kidnapping and killing 15-year-old Sierra LaMar three years later.

“He hit me with a shock device,” Walters told a 911 dispatcher a in a weak voice of the March 19, 2009, attack, which occurred after 11 pm. The recording was played in court for the jury of six men and six women.

She testified her attacker struck and tried to shock her multiple times, leaving burns on her neck, and that she dislocated her a finger on her left hand punching back at him. The attacker wound up dropping the stun gun after her screams caught the attention of another shopper in the lot. Walters said she chased the assailant in her white Toyota Land Cruiser but he escaped.

She was one of three women attacked in similar fashion that year. Prosecutors allege that Antolin Garcia-Torres, 25, attacked all three, then kidnapped and killed Sierra on March 16, 2012 as she walked to catch her bus to school. She remains missing.

Garcia-Torres has pleaded not guilty to all the charges, for which he could be sentenced to death or to life in prison without parole if convicted. His lawyer, Al Lopez, has challenged the genetic DNA evidence prosecutors say shows Sierra, whom Garcia-Torres said he’d never met, was in his car.

And Lopez has argued the attacks on the other women three years earlier were likely attempted purse-snatchings rather than kidnappings, that they didn’t involve Garcia-Torres and that they possibly were committed by more than one man.

Prosecutors eventually linked Garcia-Torres to the 2009 attacks after Sierra disappeared because his fingerprint was found on the stun gun battery. Last week, Safeway store manager Jeffrey Scales testified that employees were aware of location of parking lot surveillance cameras. The attacks occurred outside their range.

Lopez suggested the print got there when Garcia-Torres restocked opened battery packages.

But Walters, who never got a good look at her attacker, couldn’t pick Garcia-Torres out of a police photo lineup, telling officers “I don’t think so” when shown his picture. She identified other two men as the potential assailants, but as police were leaving, changed her mind, saying one of the men was definitely not involved.

Tracey Kaplan is a reporter for the Bay Area News Group based at The Mercury News. A former courts reporter, she is now reporting primarily on consumer issues, and welcomes any tips/suggestions, especially on how to make ends meet in the Bay Area. Watch for a series this summer on her personal solution to the housing crisis -- spending her nest egg on turning a cargo van into what will eventually be her full-time home. For more info, see @itsavanlife on Instagram and our Facebook group, Full House: Inside the Bay Area housing shortage.